Ms Macri, who was working with Australian Government agencies as well as private businesses at the time of the fire, lost a large amount of information after one of her hard drives was damaged in the fire, which she said knocked the business.

Ms Macri and her family, who narrowly missed losing their house to the Canberra bushfires in 2003, said they were not well prepared.

‘We ran our consulting company from the front room of the home and we got a call from our neighbour saying ‘I don’t want to worry you Silvana but there’s smoke billowing out of your house and I’ve called the fire brigade,’ and I was just in shock,’ Ms Macri said.

‘A couple of our drives were irreplaceable and again it just happened so quickly and we kicked ourselves.’

Ms Macri developed SureData, a cloud-based system that backs up data that can be retrieved after fire or theft occurs.

Neil Salvia, a small business owner from Osborne Park, lost the majority of his businesses information after his computers and hard drives were stolen in an office robbery in 2011.

‘They literally took everything and I was left with nothing, all seven years of work gone so obviously I had to think of something new and that was introduced to Silvana,’ Mr Salvia said.

After backing up his business with SureData, Mr Salvia encouraged businesses to be aware of the cost of not backing up computer information.

‘In a small business like my own, its essential that you have a cloud-based system to protect yourself so you don’t lose everything.’